In the months between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, events swirled round the peculiar pivot where Lincoln moved, and put him into further personal isolation. So often daylight seemed to break—and it was a false dawn—and it was as yet night. When hope came singing a soft song, it was more than once shattered by the brass laughter of cannon and sudden bayonets preceding the rebel yell.
Said Howell Cobb of Georgia in early ’63: “Only two things stand in the way of an amicable settlement of the whole difficulty: the Landing of the Pilgrims and Original Sin.’’
The first combat of Negro troops against white had taken place in the Vicksburg area when 1,000 enlisted Union black men defended Milliken’s Bend from an attack of some 2,000 Confederates. The fighting was mainly hand-to-hand. General Elias S. Dennis said, “White and black men were lying side by side, pierced by bayonets. Two men, one white and the other black, were found side by side, each with the other’s bayonet through his body.” As such news spread North it intensified agitation for and against the use of more Negro regiments. In the deepening bitterness General John M. Thayer and others heard Lincoln say his main anxiety was in the North. “The enemy behind us is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us.”
The Richmond Government could not have planted a readier spokesman in Congress at Washington than it had in Clement L. Vallandigham saying that more than 1,000,000 had been called to arms: “Seventy-five thousand first. . . then eighty-three thousand more were demanded; and three hundred and ten thousand responded . . . The President next asked for four hundred
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thousand, and Congress . . . gave him five hundred thousand; and, not to be outdone, he took six hundred and thirty-seven thousand. Half of these melted away in their first campaign." Should the war go on? “I answer no—not a day, not an hour,” shouted Vallandigham. He outlined a plan for the soldiers of both armies to fraternize and go home, while the governments at Washington and Richmond should not even negotiate a treaty of peace.
A peace man of shaded sincerity, Vallandigham of Dayton, Ohio, had the country’s eye. His father, a Presbyterian minister, traced directly to a Huguenot driven out of France for religious convictions, settling in Virginia in 1690. His mother was Scotch-Irish. Teaching school at Snow Hill, Maryland, he studied at night; he practiced law in Columbus, Ohio, served in the state legislature and, known as an extreme proslavery man, lost several campaigns for judge, lieutenant governor, member of Congress. Tall, bearded, sonorous, his self-righteousness gave him a personal exaltation: “I had rather that my right arm were plucked from its socket, and cast into eternal burnings, than, with my convictions, to have . . . defiled my soul with the guilt of moral perjury ... I would that my voice could penetrate the most impenetrable of all recesses, the precincts of the White House.” He became specific. “Stop fighting. Make an armistice—no formal treaty . . . Buy and sell . . . Open up railroads . . . Visit the North and West. . . the South. Exchange newspapers. Migrate. Intermarry. Let slavery alone. Hold elections at the appointed times. Let us choose a new President in sixty-four.”
More adroit was Wilbur Fisk Storey, publisher of the Chicago Times, a broken-down newspaper he had vitalized and made the voice of the extremist enemies of the Lincoln administration. A Vermont boy, he had been printer’s devil, typesetter in New York, and drifting west had edited Democratic newspapers at La Porte and Mishawaka, Indiana. In Michigan he was postmaster at Jackson under President Polk, in two cities had run drugstores, had given eight years to building up the Detroit Free Press, earning $30,000 for himself, and in 1861 at 42 had begun to give Chicago and the Middle West a morning paper that was gossipy, sensational, fearless, devious.
A tight-lipped, short-spoken man, his face whiskered except for the upper lip, Storey cultivated suspicion as a habit. During March ’63 the Chicago Times printed items about “the impeachment of the President at the opening of the next session of Congress ... the crimes committed by the Executive . . . have furnished ample grounds for his impeachment; and every true patriot will rejoice to learn that he is to be brought to punishment ...”
Without basis or explanation, the New York Day Book, the Chicago Times and like party organs printed the one sentence: “The Presidents son, Bob, as he is called, a lad of some twenty summers, has made half a million dollars in
government contracts.” That was the item entire. How or where the Presidents son made his money, by what particular contracts, was not told or hinted at.
Old Sam Medary was a philosopher, a natural dissenter and fanatic protes- tant, whose weekly newspaper, the Crisis at Columbus, Ohio, presented the ancient Anglo-Saxon case for personal liberty. Born of a Quaker mother, he was in his editorials eloquently antiwar and consistently held Lincoln all wrong, on the premise that all wars are all wrong.
Bluff, gray-bearded, sincere Sam Medary, 62 years old, could sit at his desk and keep up a running conversation with any visitor as his pen chased along writing an editorial. “Abe Linkin reminds us of a little anecdote we once heard, very foolish and no nub to it,” he wrote. Or “If Abe Lincoln is the Government, with his army of official thieves, would it not be an act of patriotism to notify such a Government to skedaddle as soon as possible?” The President’s course was “serpentine,” said the Crisis.
A mob one night wrecked the print shop, smashed the editorial desks, and Editor Medary issued a number blaming soldiers from Camp Chase, egged on by the Ohio State Journal editor, whom he characterized as “dirty pup,” “hired pimp,” “daily associate of burglars,” “gloating hyena”; the Republicans concerned were “idiots and knavish asses.”
One morsel of utterance from Lincoln was seized on. Editors and orators of the opposition hurled their strength at Lincolns fragment in his inaugural address: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.” They demurred to Lincoln’s progressions in styling the Negroes in 1859 “negroes”; in 1860, “colored men”; in 1861, “intelligent contrabands”; in 1862, “free Americans of African descent.”
In New York City, Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph, headed the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, sending forth showers of Peace Democrat pamphlets. To a brother-in-law Morse wrote that Lincoln was “weak,” “vacillating,” “illiterate,” “a President without brains.”
Northern fleets and armies had shattered and desolated Southern cities with houses mute as dried skulls. This, while in the North many streams of life flowed on as if the war had never been heard of.
Lincoln was “the Baboon President,” “a low-bred obscene clown,” if you believed the Atlanta Intelligencer while Robert E. Lee had with his own hands flogged a slave girl and poured brine on her bleeding wounds, if you believed the Boston Transcript. Each side played for hate.
New York Peace Democrats took fresh vigor from their new governor, Horatio Seymour, 53, a man of inherited fortune who had served as mayor
of Utica, speaker of the state assembly, lieutenant governor, delegate to national conventions. Seymour shaved his face, liked a muffler of whiskers under his jaws; ringlets of hair circled his bald pate. He called for an end to “the incompetents” at Washington who would never save the nation; he said compromise measures could have prevented the war. The Emancipation Proclamation, Seymour said on taking office, violated the Constitution; to free 4,000,000 Negro slaves, the North would require a military despotism.
Lincoln wrote to Seymour in March ’63 a letter so openly friendly that Seymour was suspicious as he read: “You and I are substantially strangers; and I write this chiefly that we may become better acquainted. I, for the time being, am at the head of a nation which is in great peril; and you are at the head of the greatest State of that nation ... In the performance of my duty, the co-operation of your State, as that of others, is needed—in fact, is indispensable. This alone is a sufficient reason why I should wish to be at a good understanding with you. Please write me at least as long a letter as this—of course, saying in it, just what you think fit.” Seymour sent a brother to Washington to convey assurances of loyal support and to protest against arbitrary arrests.
A New York Tribune editorial March 25, 1863, noted that politically the war issue dwarfed all others: ‘“Tell your brother,’ said President Lincoln lately to the brother of a prominent Democratic aspirant to the Presidency, ‘that he can not be the next President of the United States unless there shall be a United States to preside over.’”
On the last day before a new Congress with new Democratic members would take their seats, a Conscription Act was passed empowering the Government to divide the country into districts with provost marshals and enrollment boards authorized to raise troops by drafting all able-bodied citizens between 20 and 45.
Debate raged on what the Constitution meant in saying “The . . . writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Had the President alone the power to suspend the writ, or did he need Congress to tell him when? This issue would not down. English history and law seemed to favor Parliament as against the King, and Congress as against the President. Lincoln himself had seldom directly ordered arrests of the sort complained of. But Stanton and Seward had, and Lincoln had not interfered.
Seward telegrams would read, “Arrest Leonard Sturtevant and send him to Port La Fayette,” or, “Send William Pierce to Fort La Fayette.” Stanton would notify a U.S. marshal that John Watson was in Boston at No. 2 Oliver Place. “Watch him, look out for the clothes and letters, and seize them and
arrest him when it is the right time. Don’t let him see or communicate with anyone, but bring him immediately to Washington.” Men arrested were charged with treason, disloyalty, inciting or participating in riot, aiding and abetting rebels, defrauding the Government, stealing Government property, robbing the U.S. mail, blockade-running, smuggling, spying, enticing soldiers to desert, aiding and harboring deserters, defrauding recruits of bounty, horsestealing. The charges went into the records or again they did not.
The terror of secret and arbitrary arrests was softened somewhat by the Habeas Corpus bill of March 3, 1863. The Secretaries of State and of War were directed to furnish courts with names of all persons held as prisoners by authority of the Secretaries or the President. Congress made it clear that control over the habeas corpus writ rested with Congress, yet it directly authorized the President to suspend the writ. This was carefully done so that no appearance was presented of any conflict of authority between the President and Congress.
From house to house enrollers in the spring of ’63 took the names of men and boys fit for the Army. Cripples, the deaf and dumb, the blind and other defectives were exempt. So were the only son of a widowed mother, the only son of aged and infirm parents, others having dependents. In a family where two or more sons of aged and infirm parents were drafted, the father if living, or if dead the mother, must say which son would stay home and which go to war. Also anyone having $300 cash, and willing to pay it as “bounty” to a substitute, was exempt and could stay at home and laugh at the war.
Western governors reported the secret Knights of the Golden Circle as disguising itself under various names, with oaths, passwords, rituals and rifles, aiming to encourage desertion, defeat the draft, and protect its members by force. In a few weeks 2,600 deserters had been arrested. Seventeen deserters fortified a log cabin and, provisioned by neighbors, defied siege. Two draft- enrollers were murdered in Indiana; women threw eggs, men rioted with clubs, guns, bricks. In a Pennsylvania county one enroller was forced to quit taking names, another was shot, the sawmill of another was burned. The Molly Maguires, an Irish miners’ secret society in Pennsylvania, made resistance; coal operators refused to give the names of leaders to the Government in fear their breakers might be burned; Stanton sent troops to quell the disturbers.
In St. Louis, the Reverend Dr. McPheeters refused to declare himself for the Union; he baptized a baby with the name of a Confederate general. A provost marshal arrested McPheeters and took control of the church. Lincoln studied the matter and wrote to General Curtis: “I tell you frankly, I believe he does sympathize with the rebels; but the question remains whether such a man, of unquestioned good moral character . . . can, with safety to the government
be exiled, upon the suspicion of his secret sympathies ... I must add that the U.S. government must not . . . undertake to run the churches ... It will not do for the U.S. to appoint Trustees ... or other agents for the churches.”
Illinois had 2,001 deserters arrested in six months. In January the wholesale desertions and fraternizing with the enemy among troops of the 109th Illinois regiment began to look so much like a mutiny that the entire regiment was arrested, disarmed and put under guard at Holly Springs, Mississippi; these were recruits from southern Illinois, from a triangle of land wedged between the Slave States of Kentucky and Missouri. They were disgusted with Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation; they had enlisted to fight for the Union, “not to free the niggers.” The Democratic majority in the Illinois Legislature prepared bills to restore the habeas corpus writ, to bar Negroes from entering Illinois, and otherwise to oppose the Federal Government. Then for the first time in the history of Illinois a governor prorogued the legislature, disbanded them, ordered them to go home.
Governor Morton telegraphed Lincoln he expected the Indiana Legislature in January ’63 to acknowledge the Southern Confederacy. Though the legislature did not go that far, it did return the Governor’s message with insults and a resolution saying the policies of Governor Seymour of New York were a better model. Also this Indiana Legislature tried to take military power from the Governor, with the result that the Republican members stayed away, there was no quorum, and the legislature adjourned without appropriations of money to run the state government. Needing $250,000, Governor Morton went to Washington and got it from a fund of $2,000,000 set aside for munitions of war, to be used where rebellion existed or was threatened.
The Knights of the Golden Circle claimed 1,000,000 members. At its height it probably had thousands on its rolls. The army secret service penetrated it, one private soldier joining and becoming Grand Secretary for the State of Kentucky. The Government kept informed, guarded against upheavals, arrested ringleaders, and convicted them whenever possible. Naturally, too, some of the spies and informers reported men they personally hated, paid off old grudges. Also some officials credentialed from Washington used their powers like fools and petty tyrants.
The Sons of Liberty, the Circle of Hosts, the Union Relief Society, the Order of American Knights and other oath-bound secret societies of like aims progressed in size. They sometimes bought a storekeeper’s stock entire of Colt revolvers, rifles and ammunition. Union men horsewhipped by masked committees in lonesome woodlands at night, Union men shot down in their own homes by Southern sympathizers, had their friends and kin who banded and took oaths. Violence met violence.
Protests of innocence came often from men plainly guilty. They reminded Lincoln of a governor who visited a state prison. The convicts one by one had the same story of innocence and of wrongs done them. At last the governor came to one who frankly said he had committed a crime and the sentence given him was perfect justice. “I must pardon you,” said the governor. “I can’t have you here corrupting all these good men.”
The seething of strife was not eased in the spring of ’63 by Order No. 38 issued by General Burnside commanding the Department of the Ohio, with Cincinnati headquarters. Treason, of course, was forbidden, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Order No. 38 was positive: “The habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department,” thereby making Burnside and his officers the judges of what was “sympathy” and how many times “sympathy” had to be declared to become a habit. They would also decide whether treason hid and lurked in the words of any suspect, Order No. 38 admonishing, “It must be distinctly understood that treason, express or implied, will not be tolerated in this department.”
Vallandigham, now out of Congress, went from city to city with his cry: “If it be really the design of the administration to force this issue, then come arrest, come exile, come death itself! I am ready here to-night to meet it.” On May 1 at Mount Vernon, Ohio, he rode in a parade four miles long of wagons, buggies, carriages, horsemen and a six-horse float holding 34 pretty flower girls. The Democratic Banner of Mount Vernon reported it “a proud and glorious day.” On the platform sat Congressmen Samuel S. Cox and George Hunt Pendleton. Vallandigham had practiced for his speech. He gave again his ideas that the Government at Washington was a despotism, had rejected peace offers, was waging war to liberate black slaves and enslave white men; no men deserving to be free would submit to its conscription. Order No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power; he despised it, spat upon it and trampled it under his feet. The President was “King Lincoln,” and he would advise the people to come together at the ballot box and hurl the tyrant from his throne. Applause came often. Vallandigham faced acres of people, thousands beyond reach of his voice. They led him on. His defiance and scorn of the Government ran further than in any previous hour in his career.
Three army captains from Cincinnati, in plain clothes, up close to the platform, took notes and reported to Burnside. Three nights later soldiers arrived and went to Vallandigham’s home at three in the morning. Fire bells tolled while soldiers with axes battered down doors, reached Vallandigham, gave him a few minutes to dress, then took him to the train for Cincinnati. A crowd of some 500 moved to the Dayton Journal, a Republican newspaper,
broke the office windows with bricks and stones, smashed the doors, fired revolvers, put a torch to the building, gutted it.
Vallandigham from a jail cell in Cincinnati issued, without censorship, an address: “I am a Democrat—for the Constitution, for law, for the Union, for liberty—this is my only ‘crime.’ In obedience to the demand of Northern abolition disunionists and traitors, I am here in bonds today.” A military commission tried Vallandigham and sentenced him to Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, till the war was over.
Anger, indignation and high crying rose from many newspapers and partisan Democrats. Burnside telegraphed the President he would resign if so desired. The President replied: “When I shall wish to supersede you I will let you know. All the cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting, for instance, Vallandigham, some perhaps, doubting, that there was a real necessity for it— but, being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”
Lincoln’s choice now seemed to lie between approval of the sentence or annulment of it. He chose still another course. The order was telegraphed to Burnside: “The President directs that without delay you send C. L. Vallandigham under secure guard to the headquarters of General Rosecrans, to be put by him beyond our military lines; and in case of his return within our lines, he be arrested and kept in close custody for the term specified in his sentence.”
Vallandigham issued, without censorship, another address: “Because despotism and superior force so will it, I go within the Confederate lines ... in vain the malice of enemies shall thus continue to give color to the calumnies and misrepresentations of the past two years.” To his wife Vallandigham wrote: “I am as calm and unmoved as ever. Bear it all like a woman—a heroine. Take care of my dear, dear boy till I return. All goes well for the cause.”
In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, General Rosecrans gave the prisoner a lecture ending, . . do you know that unless I protect you with a guard my soldiers will tear you to pieces in an instant?” Vallandigham replied: “Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square to-morrow morning ... I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will Vallandigham.”
At a house near the farthest outlying Confederate picket line, Vallandigham was left: in the early morning by Union officers. At noon an ambulance took him to Bragg’s headquarters; messages arrived inviting him to the hospitality of the South. He went to Wilmington, North Carolina, reporting on parole.
Meantime on June 1 General Burnside ordered the Chicago Times suppressed. Soldiers from Camp Douglas left the work of guarding Confederate
prisoners, marched downtown and seized the newspaper plant. Copperheads made speeches that night to a Chicago crowd of 20,000 people on Court House Square. Mobs threatened to sack and burn the Chicago Tribune in retaliation. Senator Lyman Trumbull, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold and other Republicans held a conference with leading Democrats and telegraphed resolutions to the President asking him to revoke Burnside’s order.
Lincoln wrote Stanton that many dispatches had been received June 4 “which, with former ones, induce me to believe we should revoke or suspend the order suspending the Chicago Times, and if you concur in opinion, please have it done.” And the order which had brought Chicago close to mob war was revoked. The Chicago Times again appeared as usual with its customary columns of curses on Lincoln and all his works.
Meantime the state convention of the Democratic party of Ohio solemnly nominated the exiled Vallandigham lor governor while tongues raged at Lincoln who had “banished” their leader. On June 12, 1863, Lincoln gave to the country a letter addressed to “Hon. Erastus Corning & others,” the resolutions committee of the Albany Democratic convention which had blasted at the administration and demanded Vallandigham’s return to freedom. Lincoln’s letter covered the main points brought against him as to personal liberty, jails, gags, handcuffs.
As a Chief Magistrate he saw a distinction between peacetime arrests and the jailing of men during a gigantic rebellion. “The former is directed at the small per centage of ordinary and continuous perpetration of crime; while the latter is directed at sudden and extensive uprisings against the government, which, at most, will succeed or fail, in no great length of time. In the latter case, arrests are made, not so much for what has been done, as for what probably would be done ... In such cases the purposes of men are much more easily understood, than in cases of ordinary crime.”
Would a search of history reveal one civil war where the prevailing government had not used individuals with violence and injustice in cases where civil rights were involved? “Nothing is better known to history than that courts of justice are utterly incompetent to such cases. Civil courts are organized for trials of individuals ... in quiet times . . . Even in times of peace, bands of horse-thieves and robbers frequently grow too numerous and powerful for the ordinary courts of justice. But what comparison, in numbers, have such bands ever borne to the insurgent sympathizers even in many of the loyal states? Again, a jury too frequently have at least one member, more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor. And yet again, he who dissuades one man from volunteering, or induces one soldier to desert, weakens the Union cause as much as he who kills a union soldier in battle. Yet this dissuasion,
or inducement, may be so conducted as to be no defined crime of which any civil court would take cognizance.”
Pointing to the death penalty as a requisite of military organization, he inquired: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptible government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.”
The authors of the Albany resolutions had referred to themselves as “democrats” rather than as “American citizens” in time of national peril. “I would have preferred to meet you upon a level one step higher than any party platform . . . But since you have denied me this, I will yet be thankful, for the country’s sake, that not all democrats have done so.” The general who arrested and tried Vallandigham, also the judge who denied the writ of habeas corpus to Vallandigham, were both Democrats. “And still more, of all those democrats who are nobly exposing their lives and shedding their blood on the battle-field, I have learned that many approve the course taken with Mr. V. while I have not heard of a single one condemning it.”
The President believed that as the confusion of opinion and action of wartime fell into more regular channels “the necessity for arbitrary dealing” might decrease. He so desired. “Still, I must continue to do so much as may seem to be required by the public safety.”
To the foregoing a reply was made by Ohio Vallandigham Democrats who called and read it to Lincoln. They asked, “not as a favor,” that Vallandigham be given back his rights as a citizen. Their “earnestness” about the Constitution being violated the President in his reply saw as noteworthy and would add: “You claim that men may, if they choose, embarrass those whose duty it is, to combat a giant rebellion, and then be dealt with in turn, only as if there was no rebellion. The constitution itself rejects this view.”
He wrote of how “armed combinations” had resisted arrests of deserters, had resisted draft enrollment, and “quite a number of assassinations” had occurred. “These had to be met by military force, and this again has led to bloodshed and death . . . this hindrance, of the military, including maiming and murder, is due to the course in which Mr. V. has been engaged, in a greater degree than to any other cause; and is due to him personally, in a greater degree than to any other one man . . . With all this before their eyes the convention you represent have nominated Mr. V. for Governor of Ohio;
and both they and you, have declared the purpose to sustain the national Union by all constitutional means. But, of course, they and you, in common, reserve to yourselves to decide what are constitutional means . . . Your own attitude, therefore, encourages desertion, resistance to the draft and the like, because it teaches those who incline to desert, and to escape the draft, to believe it is your purpose to protect them.” He closed in the tone of one at the head of a government: “Still, in regard to Mr. V. and all others, I must hereafter as heretofore, do so much as the public safety may seem to require.”
Those who had relatives in the Army read the dispatch three or four times a week in the newspapers: “Two or more deserters were shot this morning.” And Harper’s Weekly inquired, “Instead of wanting Vallandigham back, ought we not rather to demand of the President, in justice and mercy, that a few more examples be made of Northern traitors?”
The President heard from the Peace Democrats in one key, the antislavery radicals in another. Said Wendell Phillips: “I believe that the President may do anything to save the Union. He may take a man’s houses, his lands, his bank-stock, his horses, his slaves,—anything to save the Union . . . We need one step further,—an act of Congress abolishing slavery wherever our flag waves . . Whose will and wit could be trusted? “None of them—I am utterly impartial,—neither President nor Cabinet nor Senate . . .” It seemed “childish” for the President, “in bo-peep secrecy, to hide himself in the White House and launch a proclamation at us on a first day of January. The nation should have known it sixty days before.”
On the slave question: “The President is an honest man; that is, he is Kentucky honest. . . the very prejudices and moral callousness which made him in 1860 an available candidate . . . necessarily makes him a poor leader,— rather no leader at all,—in a crisis like this.”
An excited delegation of clergymen, troubled about the conduct of the war, came with protests. The President heard them through and, as the reading public had it from newspapers, he replied: “Gentlemen, suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across the Niagara River on a rope, would you shake the cable, or keep shouting out to him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter!—Blondin, stoop a little more—go a little faster—lean a little more to the north—lean a little more to the south’? No! you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The Government is carrying an immense weight. Untold treasures are in their hands. They are doing the very best they can. Don’t badger them. Keep silence, and we’ll get you safe across.”
The New York Times took as “one of the deepest sensations of the war” the order of General Grant excluding all Jews as a class from his military
department. “The order, to be sure, was promptly set aside by the President but the affront to the Jews conveyed by its issue, was not so easily effaced.”
Thousands of Negroes had been enlisted as soldiers in the first six months of 1863. Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas of the War Department, in the lower Mississippi region in March, reported renewed faith in arming the blacks. He addressed 11,000 troops of two divisions, mentioning the rebels keeping at home all their slaves to raise subsistence for the armies in the field. “The administration has determined ... to take their negroes and compel them to send back a portion of their whites to cultivate their deserted plantations. They must do this or their armies will starve.”
Thomas had gone over his message thoroughly with Lincoln and Stanton. “I charge you all if any of this unfortunate race come within your lines . . . that you receive them kindly and cordially . . . They are to be received with open arms; they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed ... I am here to say that I am authorized to raise as many regiments of blacks as I can. I am authorized to give commissions from the highest to the lowest.”
Word had spread of the Confederate Government’s order that white officers commanding Negro troops should never be taken prisoner, but put to death. Officers and men listening to the Adjutant General well knew this. “I desire only those whose hearts are in it, and to them alone will I give commissions . . . While I am authorized thus, in the name of the Secretary of War, I have the fullest authority to dismiss from the army any man, be his rank what it may, whom I find maltreating the freedmen . . . This, fellow soldiers, is the determined policy of the administration. You all know full well when the President of the United States, though said to be slow in coming to a determination, when he once puts his foot down, it is there, and he is not going to take it up.” The War Department in May ’63 announced a new bureau to handle Negro recruiting.
From Port Hudson on the Mississippi June 14 came word that colored troops under General Paine had led an assault, put their flag on a fort parapet amid fearful slaughter, leaving their commander wounded in front of the enemy’s works as they retired. A half-mile away on a call for volunteers to go back and rescue the General, 16 stepped out from the colored regiments, moved forward in squads of four. And they brought back their general’s body though only two of the 16 Negroes were alive.
A new status of the Negro was slowly taking form. In August ’62 for the first time was sworn testimony taken from a Negro in a court of law in Virginia. Also Negro strikebreakers in New York were attacked by strikers, and in Chicago Negroes employed in meat-packing plants were assaulted by unemployed white men. The colored man was becoming an American citizen.
Stories arose that Confederate troops had a law to themselves: “Kill every nigger!” No distinctions would be made in battle as between free Negroes and fugitive slaves. Written petitions and spoken appeals came to Lincoln that he must retaliate: kill one Confederate white prisoner for every Negro Union soldier executed.
Negroes marching to war—with weapons—to kill—and to kill white men—it was at first a little unreal. Longfellow wrote in his diary May 28, 1863, of a visit to Boston: “Saw the first regiment of blacks march through Beacon Street. An imposing sight, with something wild and strange about it, like a dream. At last the North consents to let the Negro fight for freedom.”
In an Indiana town, controlled by Copperheads, Sojourner Truth was introduced to speak at an antislavery meeting. A local physician and leading Copperhead rose and said word had spread over the community that the speaker of the evening was a man in woman’s disguise; it was the wish of many present that the speaker of the evening should show her breasts to a committee of ladies. Sojourner Truth, tall, strong, unafraid, illiterate though having a natural grace of speech and body, stood silent a few moments. Then she loosed the clothing of her bosom, showed her breasts, and said in her own simple words and her deep contralto voice that these breasts she was showing had nursed black children, yes, but more white children than black. The audience sat spellbound. A few Copperheads slowly filed out. Toward one of them who had a look of hate and doubt on his face, Sojourner Truth shook her breasts with the melancholy query, “You want to suck?” And in this atmosphere, the gaunt black woman, the former slave, began her plea for the freedom of her race.
Strange was the play of men’s thought and imagination around the Negro and his role. Antislavery journals reprinted from the Memphis Bulletin: “A Negro went into a menagerie, in which was a large baboon in a cage. He approached the cage closely while the baboon went through several gyrations, such as nodding and shaking his head, holding out his hands to shake, etc., to the evident delight of both Negro and baboon. Finally, the baboon seemed so intelligent and knowing, the Negro addressed him some remarks, which the baboon only answered by a nod of the head. At length the Negro was still more delighted, and broke forth with the remark, ‘You’re right; don’t open your month, kase if you spokes a word the white man’l have a shovel in your hand in less dan a minit.’”
There came to Lincoln the foremost of fugitive slaves. By authority of the President to Governor Andrew of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of colored men, this ex-slave had led in recruiting the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments, two of his own sons in the 54th. Hundreds of black
men of the 54th, and their white colonel, had been killed assaulting a fort in South Carolina, the white colonel’s body resting, as South Carolinians reported, “between layers of dead niggers.” And Lincoln held his firsr conference on important business of state with a mulatto, Frederick Douglass. Born in Maryland of a black slave mother, his father a white man, Douglass had grown up as a plantation boy living through winters without shoes or stockings. He grew to a superb physical strength, worked in shipyards as a calker, and learned to read. In the red shirt and bandanna of a sailor, with papers loaned to him by a free Negro, he rode out of Baltimore on a railroad train. In New York he recognized on Broadway another escaped slave, who told him to stay away from all Negroes, as there were informers among them who would send him back where he came from for a few dollars’ reward. Then Douglass met abolitionists who paid his way to New Bedford, where he worked at his trade of calker.
Antislavery men noticed he was a natural orator and sent him from city to city to tell of his life as a slave. He had sent word to a free black woman in Maryland, who came North, married him and they made a home in Rochester, New York, where in the cellar they once had 11 runaway Negroes.
Douglass read Lincoln as completely mistaken in his Negro colonization policy. “The colored race can never be respected anywhere till they are respected in America.” According to Douglass, the President listened with patience and silence, was serious, even troubled. To the point that colored soldiers ought to receive the same wages as white soldiers, the President said that employment of colored soldiers at all was a great gain to the colored people; that the wisdom of making colored men soldiers was still doubted; that their enlistment was a serious offense to popular prejudice; that they had larger motives for being soldiers than white men; that they ought to be willing to enter the service upon any conditions; that the fact they were not to receive the same pay as white soldiers seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment as soldiers, but that ultimately they would receive the same pay as whites.
On the second point, that colored prisoners should receive the same protection and be exchanged as readily and on the same terms as white prisoners, and that there should be retaliation for the shooting or hanging of colored prisoners, the President said the case was more difficult. Retaliation was a terrible remedy—once begun, no telling where it would end; that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty of treating colored soldiers as felons, he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings. “In all this,” noted Douglass, “I saw the tender heart of the man rather than the
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stern warrior and Commander-in-Chief of the American army and navy, and while I could not agree with him, I could but respect his humane spirit.
On the third point, that colored soldiers who performed great and uncommon service on the battlefield should be rewarded by distinction and promotion precisely as were white soldiers, the President had less difficulty, though he did not absolutely commit himself, simply saying he would sign any commissions for colored soldiers which his Secretary of War should commend to him. “Though I was not entirely satisfied with his views,” noted Douglass, “I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict, I determined to go on with the recruiting.”
In an interlude of their talk Lincoln asked, “Who is this Phillips who has been pitching into me?” adding later: “Well, tell him to go on. Let him make the people willing to go in for emancipation; and I’ll go with them.”
From Memphis early in ’63 Charles A. Dana reported to the War Department “a mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton, raging in a vast population of Jews and Yankees.” Under Federal permits they bought cotton low from Southern planters and sold high to New England textile works. Dana himself had put in $10,000, gone into partnership with a cotton expert, and was in line to make a fortune, yet he wrote to Stanton, “I should be false to my duty did I . . . fail to implore you to put an end to an evil so enormous, so insidious.”
Grant agreed with Stanton; the cotton trade was corrupting in and out of the Army; the profits of it should go to the Government. Dana arrived in Washington, had many conversations with Lincoln and Stanton. The President in March issued a proclamation outlawing all commercial intercourse with insurrectionary states except under Treasury Department regulations. One public sale by an army quartermaster of 500 bales of cotton confiscated by Grant at Oxford and Holly Springs, Mississippi, brought over $1,500,000 cash, nearly paying the cost of Grant’s supplies and stores burned by the enemy at Oxford.
A war prosperity was on, gold rising in price, paper money getting cheaper. Amos A. Lawrence, humanitarian millionaire merchant of Boston, wrote to Sumner: “Cheap money makes speculation, rising prices and rapid fortunes, but it will not make patriots. Volunteers will not be found for the army when paper fortunes are so quickly made at home; and drafting will be resisted . . . We must have Sunday all over the land, instead of feasting and gambling.”
A New York World editorial writer saw a new moneyed class attaining domination: “. . . 1 his is the age of shoddy. The new brown-stone palaces on
Fifth Avenue, the new equipages at the Park, the new diamonds which dazzle unaccustomed eyes, the new silks and satins which rustle overloudly, as if to demand attention, the new people who live in the palaces, and ride in the carriages, and wear the diamonds and silks—all are shoddy. From devil’s dust they sprang, and unto devil’s dust they shall return. They set or follow the shoddy fashions, and fondly imagine themselves a la mode de Paris, when they are only a la mode de shoddy . . . Six days in the week they are shoddy business men. On the seventh day they are shoddy Christians.”
Food prices had slowly gone up; clothes, house rent, coal, gas, cost more. This pressure on workingmen brought an agitation in New York that resulted in new trade-unions. The World reported a mass meeting in Cooper Union with the building crammed to capacity and hundreds waiting outside. Nearly all trades were represented, and resolutions were adopted unanimously pointing to wage rates inadequate to the cost of living and urging all trades to organize and send delegates to a central body.
In spite of corruption and chicanery, an economic system of new factors was getting deep rootholds. Colt’s firearms factory at Hartford, Connecticut, declared a 30 per cent dividend for 1862. Aspinwall, Vanderbilt, Drew, Gould and others foresaw, once the war ended, an era of money-making, speculations and developments, individual fortunes to surpass by far any reckonings of finance in the former generation. Immigration was bringing to American shores a supply of workers that would result in a labor market more than requisite to the needs of capitalist industry.
The National Bank Act of February ’63 was presented as a device to get money to run the war, while gaining stability in currency through co-operation with the bankers, bondholders and business interests having cash and resources. Therefore it stipulated gold payment of interest on bonds. Five or more persons, under the National Bank Act, could associate and form a bank having capital of $50,000 or more. On depositing in the U.S. Treasury interest- bearing bonds to the amount of one-third of the paid-in capital of the bank, the Government would engrave money for them, National Bank certificates, to the amount of 90 per cent of the par value of the bonds deposited. The banks would use these new certificates for carrying on a regular banking business, receiving the full profit as though they were the bank’s own notes. Also the banks would receive, from the Government, interest payment in gold on the bonds deposited in the Treasury.
Thus the double profit of banker’s interest on Government guaranteed and supervised money issues, and the gold-paid interest on bonds, was the inducement by which Chase, with Lincoln’s complete endorsement, proposed to rally cash resources to the war for the Union. Also the aim was to bring
order out of chaos in currency. Across the country were in circulation more than 8,300 sorts of paper money of solvent banks, according to one financial writer, while the issues of fraudulent, broken and worthless banks brought the total up to more than 13,000.
“Shinplasters” was the nickname for much of this mongrel money; once a soldier had used them as plasters for a wounded shinbone. Bills of the banks of one state found no circulation in another. A traveler passing through several states might have to change his money several times, pay heavy discounts and sometimes commissions. Of Government greenbacks $173 would buy $100 of gold money, perhaps moving toward the time Chase had in mind when he said earlier, “The war must go on until the rebellion is put down, if we have to put out paper until it takes a thousand dollars to buy a breakfast.” Chase had urged the National Bank Act as “a firm anchorage to the Union of States,” which would “reconcile as far as practicable the interests of existing institutions with those of the whole people.” Lincoln in his December ’62 message to Congress advocated its passage.
A Republican element, holding the view of Thaddeus Stevens that it was a moneylender’s measure, unjust to the debtor class, had little to say by way of criticism, waited to see if it would bring in the war funds promised while also, as Lincoln hoped, operating to “protect labor against the evils of a vicious currency.” From opposition Democrats, few in number and influence, an outcry arose that the new national banking system would create a more insidious centralization of money power than the old Bank of the United States which Andrew Jackson had destroyed.
In these financial matters, Nicolay and Hay noted, “Mr. Chase had the constant support of the President,” who sometimes made suggestions but did not insist on their being adopted. When the Secretary needed his help with Congress, the President gave it ungrudgingly to the one department of the Government where he was least expert.
A committee of New Yorkers asked the President for a gunboat to protect their city. Lincoln was puzzled. The committee were introduced as “gentlemen representing $100,000,000 in their own right.” Lincoln heard them through, and in his speech, as Lawrence Weldon heard it, said:
. . It is impossible for me, in the condition of things, to furnish you a gunboat. The credit of the Government is at a very low ebb. Greenbacks are not worth more than 40 or 50 cents on the dollar, and in this condition of things, if I was worth half as much as you gentlemen are represented to be, and as badly frightened as you seem to be, I would build a gun-boat and give it to the Government.” Weldon quoted one who listened as saying he “never saw one hundred millions sink to such insignificant proportions
as it did when that committee recrossed the threshold of the White House, sadder but wiser men.”
The spring and early summer of ’63 saw Lincoln’s rating among large groups of respectable people of influence sink lower than at any time since he had become President. Richard H. Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, also an able attorney who had managed Government cases in prize courts, wrote in March to Charles Francis Adams in London: “As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head . . . He has a kind of shrewdness and common sense, mother-wit, and slipshod, low-levelled honesty, that made him a good Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is.”
One of the three Republican Congressmen—three and no more—who defended Lincoln on the floor of the House was Albert G. Riddle of Ohio. For weeks the denunciations of the President by his own party men had flowed on, mixed with clamor and sniping criticism, Riddle interposing that “the just limit of manly debate” had been “brutally outraged.” The press had “caught up and reechoed” the clamor. If the masses of people should believe what they were hearing, “no power on earth can save us from destruction, for they would shiver the only arm that must bring us safety.” Riddle would have them remember: “The war is greater than the President; greater than the two Houses of Congress . . . greater than all together; and it controls them all, and dictates its own policy; and woe to the men or party that will not heed its dictation.”
Amid the snarling chaos of the winter of 1862-63 there were indications of a secret movement to impeach Lincoln. Stubbornly had he followed his own middle course, earning in both parties enemies who for different reasons wanted him out of the way. There were radical Republicans who wanted a man obedient to their wishes. There were reactionaries in both parties who hoped the confusion of an impeachment would slow down the war, bring back habeas corpus and other civil rights. Long after this embryo conspiracy had failed of its aim, Cameron said to an interviewer, Howard Carroll, in guarded statements that would implicate neither dead nor living Republicans: “Late in 1862 or early in 1863 there can be no doubt that a secret effort was made to bring about the ejectment of President Lincoln from the White House ... I received from a number of the most prominent gentlemen an invitation to visit Washington and attend a meeting ... to be held in regard to national affairs ... I went to the capital, and . . . soon discovered that their real object was to find means by which the President could be impeached and turned out of office ... I was asked for my advice. I gave it, stating . . . that it would be little short of madness to interfere with the Administration.”
The talk of a Southern woman spy in the White House arrived at the point where Senate members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War set a secret morning session for attention to reports that Mrs. Lincoln was a disloyalist. One member of the committee told of what happened. “We had just been called to order by the Chairman, when the officer stationed at the committee room door came in with a half-frightened expression on his face. Before he had opportunity to make explanation, we understood the reason for his excitement, and were ourselves almost overwhelmed with astonishment. For at the foot of the Committee table, standing solitary, his hat in his hand, his form towering, Abraham Lincoln stood. Had he come by some incantation, thus of a sudden appearing before us unannounced, we could not have been more astounded.” There was an “almost unhuman sadness” in the eyes, and “above all an indescribable sense of his complete isolation” which the committee member felt had to do with fundamental senses of the apparition. “No one spoke, for no one knew what to say. The President had not been asked to come before the Committee, nor was it suspected that he had information that we were to investigate reports, which, if true, fastened treason upon his family in the White House.”
At last the caller spoke slowly, with control, though with a depth of sorrow in the tone of voice: “I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, appear of my own volition before this Committee of the Senate to say that I, of my own knowledge, know that it is untrue that any of my family hold treasonable communication with the enemy.” Having attested this, he went away as silent and solitary as he had come. “We sat for some moments speechless. Then by tacit agreement, no word being spoken, the Committee dropped all consideration of the rumors that the wife ol the President was betraying the Union. We were so greatly affected that the Committee adjourned for the day.”
The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to the White House, and Lincoln, as she related it, strode toward her with two outreached hands and greeted her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,” and as they seated themselves at the fireplace, “I do love an open fire; 1 always had one to home.” They talked of the years of plowshares beaten into swords. Mrs. Stowe felt about him “a dry, weary, patient pain, that many mistook for insensibility.” He said of the war, “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression I shan’t last long after it’s over.”
“Rest,” he said to Noah Brooks after a horseback ride. “I don’t know about ‘the rest’ as you call it. I suppose it is good for the body. But the tired part of me is inside and out of reach.”
Lincoln had been daily riding the three miles between the White House and Soldiers’ Home, where the family lived through the hot-weather months.
Lamon had been urging that the President have a military escort, the President each time laughing it off. One morning he met Lamon. While still on the horse Lincoln said, “I have something to tell you”; they went to the President’s office, locked the doors. As Lamon later wrote down the talk of Lincoln, he said he would not be sure of the exact words but was giving them to the best of his recollection: “Understand me, I do not want to oppose my pride of opinion against light and reason, but I am in such a state of 'betweenity’ in my conclusions that I can’t say that the judgment of this court is prepared to proclaim a reliable 'decision upon the facts presented.’” He paused. Lamon:
Cjo on, go on.
“Last night, about 11 o’clock, I went out to the Soldiers’ Home alone, riding Old Abe, as you call him (a horse he delighted in riding), and when I arrived at the foot of the hill on the road leading to the entrance of the Home grounds, I was jogging along at a slow gait . . . when suddenly I was aroused— I may say the arousement lifted me out of my saddle as well as out of my wits—by the report of a rifle, and seemingly the gunner was not fifty yards from where my contemplations ended and my accelerated transit began. My erratic namesake, with little warning . . . and with one reckless bound . . . unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug-hat, with which I parted company without any assent, expressed or implied, upon my part. At a break-neck speed we soon arrived in a haven of safety. Meanwhile I was left in doubt whether death was more desirable from being thrown from a runaway federal horse, or as the tragic result of a rifle-ball fired by a disloyal bushwhacker in the middle of the night.”
This was all told in what Lamon termed “a spirit of levity,” as though the little affair might be exaggerated in importance. Lincoln seemed to want to believe it a joke. “Now,” he went on, “in the face of this testimony in favor of your theory of danger to me, personally, I can’t bring myself to believe that anyone has shot or will deliberately shoot at me with the purpose of killing me; although I must acknowledge that I heard this fellow’s bullet whistle at an uncomfortably short distance from these headquarters of mine. I have about concluded that the shot was the result of accident. It may be that someone on his return from a day’s hunt, regardless of the course of his discharge, fired off his gun as a precautionary measure of safety to his family after reaching his house.” This was said with much seriousness.
He then playfully proceeded: “I tell you there is no time on record equal to that made by the two Old Abes on that occasion. The historic ride of John Gilpin, and Henry Wilson’s memorable display of bareback equestrianship on the stray army mule from the scenes of the battle of Bull Run, a year ago, are nothing in comparison to mine, either in point of time made or in ludicrous
pageantry . . . This whole thing seems farcical. No good can result at this time from giving it publicity ... I do not want it understood that I share your apprehensions. I never have.”
Lamon sat studying a companion who to him had always seemed prepared for the inevitable, for fate, always careless about his personal safety, and at this time not yet recovered from sorrow over the death of his son Willie. Lamon protested: “The time . . . may not be far distant when this republic will be minus a pretty respectable President.”
Death was in the air. So was birth. What was dying men did not know. What was being born none could say.
CHAPTER XVIII